Facebook makes the hardware it uses for AI open

The hardware design enables Big Sur to “train twice as fast and explore networks twice as large”, according to Facebook.

Three days later, Microsoft followed suit with the released of their own software which allows the distributing of machine learning across multiple devices to make it more powerful.

Big Sur packs eight Nvidia Tesla M40 accelerators using an OpenCL interface, but is qualified to handle other PCI Express cards.

OCP is an organization Facebook created to do for hardware what the Linux operating system did for software, make it free and open-source.

Joining an increasingly long line of companies, Facebook is making the designs behind its server used to power its AI technology open source. The social networking giant and the Mountain View tech firm are the two biggest Silicon Valley players eager to push the state of the art AI technology called deep learning even further. Having built a system that it said is twice as fast as its previous design, Facebook is now offering up its blueprints as an open source resource for other researchers.

Facebook didn’t say when it would release the specifications for Big Sur.

“The key to unlocking the knowledge necessary to develop more intelligent machines lies in the capability of our computing systems”, says Serkan Piantino, engineering director for Facebook AI Research’s (FAIR). A growing number of major tech players and smaller startups are driving the development of artificial intelligence and deep-learning technologies that will enable their products to learn, think and act more humanlike. One of the most common applications for machine learning is image recognition, wherein a computer program studies images or videos and learns to identify which objects are in that frame.

As with other servers optimized for big data center operators, Facebook streamlined existing designs to save cost and ease maintenance. Facebook also ditched components that don’t get used very much and made it so that components that fail often – like hard drives – can be removed and replaced within “seconds”. “Even the motherboard can be removed within a minute, whereas on the original AI hardware platform it would take over an hour”, they said. “In fact, Big Sur is nearly entirely tool-less -the CPU heat sinks are the only things you need a screwdriver for” Facebook says. Through collaboration, Facebook hopes we’ll get “one step closer to building complex AI systems that bring this kind of innovation to our users and, ultimately, help us build a more open and connected world”.